They number in the millions and wield increasing power and influence across the United States. From year to year their voice grows stronger and more resolute, as their role in shaping policy, and the future of American society continues to expand.

A proposal for changing the laws of taharat hamishpachah (family purity) was recently raised in the Israeli newspaper HaTzofeh, based on the observation that adherence to these laws may be responsible for many couples experiencing difficulty conceiving. Healthcare professionals have named this phenomenon “Orthodox Infertility.”

“Iraq cannot be addressed effectively in isolation from other major regional issues, interests, and unresolved conflicts,” the ISG report declares. America cannot “achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

The report issued by the Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, urges President Bush to adopt policies that amount to ignoring 13 years of Pal-estinian terrorism, incitement to hatred and murder of Israelis by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and failed concessionary Israeli policies, while at the same time calling for even more Israeli concessions to the Hamas/ PA regime.

Diversity in Judaism is common in our history and liturgy. One can visit many synagogues and observe that the order of davening and the text of siddur vary from shul to shul. When I'm in Israel I often attend the services in a Sephardi shul where the prayers and the sequence of taking the Torah from the ark and replacing it are vastly different from what I'm accustomed to.

Doctor Leonard Samson, better known as "Doc Samson," strides down the corridor and into the classroom, massive muscles rippling beneath his skin-tight red costume. He sports a long mane of hair, just like his biblical namesake (except the real Samson's hair wasn't green, presumably).

At the restaurant farewell dinner, Professor Dov Zlotnick asked the dozen or so students of his forty-year-running Saturday afternoon Talmud shiur to continue their learning despite his approaching retirement to Jerusalem.

In late November, mobs in Paris once again shouted "Death to the Jew" - the very chant that came to characterize the Dreyfus case. The Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer team had won its match with the Paris Saint-Germain team. An angry mob surrounded a French Jew named Yanniv Hazout and yelled "kill the Jew," "dirty Jew," "dirty Negro," with many raising their arms in Nazi salutes. A black French policeman rushed to Hazout's defense. The crowd threatened to kill them both. The officer fired his gun and killed one demonstrator and wounded another.

The whole world seemed to be celebrating the composer Steve Reich's 70th birthday in October (October 3, to be precise). The New York Times ranked him "among the greatest composers of the century." The New Yorke rsaid he was"the most original musical thinker of our time." The Village Voice declared him "America's greatest living composer." The Guardian (London) summed it all up by stating, "There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them."

With the Republican defeat in the congressional midterm elections and the widespread perception that America is losing in Iraq, the notion that the Bush foreign-policy doctrine is now officially dead has moved from theory to fact.

Fascinating, isn't it, to watch professors Stephen Walt (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) attain near rock-star status by resurrecting the tired and discredited canard that U.S. foreign policy is dictated by a devious, dangerous and disloyal cabal known as the pro-Israel lobby - sort of a Protocols of the Middle-Agers of Zion.

One of the most important aspects of choosing a college is its campus life and sense of community. In order to do well academically, it is important to have a healthy and wholesome social life as well. There are a number of ways to get a sense of whether or not a college is right for you.

Nearly 40 years have passed since Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were liberated from the occupying Jordanians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). That's the same number of years the Jewish people wandered in the desert before they were allowed to enter the Promised Land.